Some movie film buffs are attracted to 1940’s and 1950’s Hollywood film noir, the stylish but low-key black-and-white German expressionist influenced flicks that emphasize cynicism and sex as motivations for murder and other deadly sins (not necessarily in that order). Think Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep in 1946, with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, based on Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel of the same name. Or perhaps the 1950 classic, D.O.A., starring Edmond O’Brien and Pamela Britton.
Both are fine films, as are many others of the genre. But I wouldn’t say I am quite an aficionado of film noir. Rather, I appreciate it on its artistic merits.
The same is true for TV series science fiction or sci-fi. While I am a sucker for a good story with elements of time travel or parallel universes (“The City on the Edge of Forever,” the second to last episode of the first season of Star Trek, first broadcast on Thursday, April 6, 1967, which was awarded the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, remains in a league of its own in my mind), I’m not quite a diehard Trekkie, although I think the original series, which ran on NBC Television for three seasons from 1966 to 1969 is superb, albeit cheesy. But cheesy is OK. Popular culture is made up of a rich cornucopia of cheesy television and movies that almost require a mandatory bowl of Cheetos® to consume such classics as the black-and-white a double-bill of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, also known as The Head That Wouldn’t Die, a 1959 science-fiction-horror film, directed by Joseph Green (made for $62,000 but not released until 1962), and Plan 9 from Outer Space, the 1959 American science-fiction thriller film, written and directed by Ed Wood on a $60,000 budget, and dubbed by some critics as the worst movie ever made.
While it took me a while to warm up to it, I also came to like Star Trek: The Next Generation, which aired from 1987 to 1994. I’ve also seen most, although probably not all, of the movies from the seemingly endless Star Trek-spawned movie franchise.
Three additional Star Trek spin-offs, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise; well, I could probably count on the fingers of one hand how many episodes of the combined series I’ve ever watched, although knowing Star Trek: Enterprise, which aired originally between 2001 and 2005 and was titled simply as Enterprise for its first two seasons, features Scott Bakula of Quantum Leap fame as Capt. Jonathan Archer, and there is a recurring plot device based on the Temporal Cold War, in which a mysterious entity from the 27th century uses the Cabal, a group of genetically upgraded Suliban, to manipulate the timeline and change past events, I probably will have to give in and start watching its 98 episodes at some point.
Then there is the Christian movie genre. We discover things where we discover them. While I had seen The Rapture, a rather odd but interesting movie starring Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny, later of The X-Files and Californication fame, on VHS videotape cassette in Durham, North Carolina shortly after it was released in 1991, for me, my first real introduction into what I would call the Christian movie genre took place a decade later in Yellowknife, of all places (when I lived in Yellowknife a standard observation was that there were more bars than churches, although that’s hardly unique to Yk).
I remember seeing A Walk to Remember, an American coming-of-age teen romantic drama, when it was released in 2002 downtown at the Capitol Theatre on 52 Street, starring Shane West and Mandy Moore as Landon Carter and Jamie Sullivan, based on the 1999 novel of the same name by the Catholic romance fiction writer Nicholas Sparks. That would be the Nicholas Sparks whose earlier 1996 book, The Notebook, was released as a movie of the same name in 2004, two years after A Walk to Remember came to film screens. I can’t recall exactly how I came to find myself in the Capitol Theatre to watch A Walk to Remember. I don’t recall any of my colleagues going with me, although more than one expressed incredulity the next day when they asked me and I said I enjoyed the movie. I saw it again a couple of years ago for the first time on DVD, and I still enjoyed it.
I won’t spoil the plot for you; the summary is on the Internet and easy enough to find and the ideas, to be honest, are not exactly original. Cheesy? You bet. Pass the Cheetos®. But I’m happy to say the movie was made for about $11 million and has taken in about $47.5 million at the box office. Not a particularly big budget film and far from record box office, but OK.
I wrote a piece here in soundingsjohnbarker (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/flying-largely-under-the-mainstream-cinematic-radar-christian-movie-genre-is-hot/) last Sept. 15 headlined, “Flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar: Christian movie genre is ‘hot’” where I mentioned just a few of last year’s Christian movie offerings, including The Giver, starring three-time Academy award winner Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges, which is set in a fictional post-war 2048 where the community has decided to get rid of colors and, as a consequence, different races and feelings. All citizens have had the memories from before erased from their minds.
I also talked a bit about Heaven Is for Real, directed by Randall Wallace and written by Christopher Parker, based on Pastor Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent’s 2010 book of the same name, and starring Greg Kinnear, Kelly Reilly, Jacob Vargas and Nancy Sorel, which tells the story of three-year-old Imperial, Nebraska, native Colton Burpo, the son of Pastor Burpo, and what he says he experienced heaven during emergency surgery; and When the Game Stands Tall, starring Jim Caviezel, best known for portraying Jesus in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, now playing Catholic De La Salle High School Spartans’ football coach Bob Ladouceur (with Laura Dern as his wife, Bev Ladouceur), and telling the story of the record-setting 151-game 1992–2003 winning streak by De La Salle of Concord, California, just east of San Francisco. The movie is an adaptation of the 2003 book of the same name by Neil Hayes, then a columnist with the Contra Costa Times. The movie was filmed in Louisiana.
As well, I mentioned Tim Chey’s movie, Final: The Rapture, released in 2013 in theatres, but on DVD just last November, starring Jah Shams, Mary Grace, Carman, Masashi Nagadoi and Dave Edwards. While there have been generally cheesy church-sponsored, Halloween “Hell Houses” videos in the past, Final: The Rapture is an unusual sub-genre of Christian horror movie or Christian disaster movie. The movie’s poster promise, “When the Rapture strikes … all of hell will break loose.”
Chey said his purpose is “to scare the living daylights out of nonbelievers … If it means I have to make a horror film to make it realistic to win people to Christ, then so be it.”
Online Maranatha News of Toronto calls Final: The Rapture “the scariest Christian movie ever.”
Final: The Rapture depicts the apocalyptic chaos that ensues for four nonbelievers – an African-American, an Asian, a Hispanic and a Caucasian man living in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and on a South Pacific island, after the Rapture occurs. “In Los Angeles, Colin Nelson desperately attempts to flee to Bora Bora. Keenly aware that he’s in the Tribulation period, his only hope is in a mysterious man. In Tokyo, a journalist, Masashi, tries to unravel the disappearance of millions of people as the government closes in on him. In Buenos Aires, Marie searches for her final relative as time runs out. And on a deserted island in the South Pacific, Tom Wiseman, an avowed atheist, attempts to be rescued after his plane goes down.”
The film was shot in six countries over five months for about $7 million, Final: The Rapture, raised the necessary production money across a spectrum of investors, ranging from faith-based to hedge funds.
Just in passing, I wrote about God’s Not Dead with Kevin Sorbo; Noah with Russell Crowe; Son of God, produced by evangelical Mark Burnett from Survivor, and his Catholic wife, Roma Downey (whose A.D.: The Bible Continues miniseries based on the early church, as described in the first 10 chapters of the Acts of the Apostles is airing on NBC currently); and the “new” Left Behind movie about the Rapture by Paul Lalonde and Stoney Lake Entertainment, with Nicolas Cage starring as Rayford Steele, and Civil Twilight’s song “Letters from the Sky” being used in the trailer, released in North American theatres last October.
The interesting thing is if I was to revisit the genre today nine months later for a comprehensive update, I’d be saying the Christian movie genre is not just hot, it is on fire, churning out television miniseries and movies at a pace that would be better suited to a book than a blog post.
Mind you, the devil, Prince of this World, is not surprisingly about to get his due as well. Such is the nature of the supernatural and spiritual warfare.
A new DC Comics-based Fox TV high-concept genre series Lucifer where Lucifer Morningstar “bored and unhappy as the Lord of Hell, resigns his throne and abandons his kingdom for the gorgeous, shimmering insanity of Los Angeles, where he opens an exclusive piano bar called Lux” is set to air on Fox next year.
It gives new meaning to the dangers of glamorizing evil, something we Catholics get a refresher course in every Easter through the renewal of our baptismal promises where the priest asks us, “Do you renounce Satan and all his works, and all his empty show; do you renounce the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin; do you renounce Satan, the author and prince of sin?”
The production of Lucifer is incredibly slick and well done. That said, watching a three-minute trailer on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4bF_quwNtw), I couldn’t help laughing near the end of the trailer when Lucifer, played by Tom Ellis, baffled, asks the female L.A.P.D. homicide detective, Chloe Dancer (played by Lauren German) who unlike almost all the other women who are charmed by him, while she isn’t, “Did my father send you?”
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